Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image pickup apparatus such as a digital camera or a digital video camera mounted with an air cooling unit.
Description of the Related Art
An image pickup apparatus such as digital video camera mounted with an air cooling unit has been known. For example, there has been proposed a video camera that has a cooling fan disposed inside an exterior casing of the video camera (Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2009-296469). In this proposal, an air inlet port formed in the exterior casing of the video camera is connected through a ventilation duct to the cooling fan, thereby sucking a sufficient amount of air for heat radiation into inside the video camera to efficiently cool camera component parts that generate heat.
In recent image pickup apparatuses such as digital cameras, an amount of heat generated in a circuit board increases with enhancement of apparatus functionality. As a result, it becomes difficult to achieve a sufficient heat radiation effect by the above-described heat radiation structure where the air inlet port is connected to the cooling fan through the ventilation duct. In addition, image pickup apparatuses of this type do not have a sufficient rigidity against external compression and torsion. To increase the rigidity, reinforcing members must be added, resulting in increased cost.